Page content

Tavern Music

by Ed Crews

The pocket fiddle, small enough to easily bring to a musical
gathering, was a mainstay of tavern tunes. This is a reproduction.

The crowd at Chowning's Tavern is ready to relax after a day
of touring Colonial Williamsburg's Historic Area. Customers are talking,
drinking, and cracking open peanuts. Most don't notice when John Turner enters
the candlelit room clad in colonial garb, carrying his fiddle. But, when he
begins to play eighteenth-century selections like "Highland Laddie" and "The
Fly," the talk trails off and the patrons give him their full attention.

As he has for decades, Turner
coaxes a lot of emotion from his fiddle and his audience. People become subdued
when he plays a lament. They are engaged completely, clapping hands and tapping
feet, when he tears into a lively dance tune. Invariably, they applaud when he
finishes a song.

Turner's spirited, expert performance and the audience's
warm response show why tavern music programs have endured in Colonial
Williamsburg since the late 1950s. These intimate performances share with guests
the music that ordinary colonists sang, danced, and listened to in taverns, at
home, and on the street. These selections ranged from traditional ballads and
hymns to bawdy, romantic, political, and humorous songs. They provide another
means of understanding eighteenth-century America. Today, evening guests can
hear this music in the Historic Area at Chowning's Tavern, Christiana
Campbell's Tavern, King's Arms Tavern, and Shields Tavern.

John Turner, Colonial Williamsburg interpreter and master of
a dozen instruments, fiddles tunes of the times at Chowning's Tavern.

For Turner, Colonial
Williamsburg's senior tavern entertainer, this work is a labor of love and the
product of a lot of research. He grew up in a house filled with music. His
father and grandfather played the fiddle. Turner began lessons at age five and
turned teacher at fifteen. He has mastered eleven more instruments, including
bagpipes and recorder.

Turner started playing in the
taverns in 1974. Over the years, he has researched early American music through
Colonial Williamsburg's resources, as well as at the Library of Congress and in
Scotland.

Many of the tunes found, learned,
and presented by Turner and other Historic Area performers have faded from the
nation's cultural memory. Some, however, come to modern Americans in childhood
and linger a lifetime.

"I frequently ask people if they
have any requests for eighteenth-century songs," Turner said. "They assume that
they don't know any. Yet most people do know some songs from the period even if
they aren't aware that they do."

Although somewhat altered in
content and meaning, well-known surviving songs include "Three Blind Mice,"
"Pop Goes the Weasel," "The Bear Went over the Mountain," "Twinkle, Twinkle,
Little Star," and, of course, "Yankee Doodle."

Colonial Williamsburg's taverns
are a logical site to perform the music familiar to ordinary colonists of the
1700s. Historical evidence shows that dancing and singing were integral to
tavern life in British North America. Trained musicians did play at inns, and
patrons did sing to entertain themselves. What they performed is less well
known. Historical records don't say much about specific selections. Turner said
there was not a class of tunes specifically known as tavern music.

Americans of that period loved song and dance, and taverns
were important in eighteenth-century public life. Nothing in twenty-first
century America is comparable. Taverns of the 1700s were partially museums,
gentlemen's clubs, circuses, schools, and business offices. They were the
grandfather of the nineteenth-century saloon, and the great-grandfather of the
modern American nightclub.

In eighteenth-century America,
taverns were also called inns, ordinaries, and public houses. Found in rural
and urban areas, they primarily provided overnight lodging for travelers.
Owners usually served alcoholic beverages and sometimes meals. Colonial
governments heavily regulated inn operations, but quality varied greatly.

"Taverns in early American ran the
gamut from the elegant to the mean and nasty, from those that catered to every
need of society's elites to those that the locals and travelers who used them
could only hope to survive," wrote Sharon V. Salinger, a University of
California history professor, in her book Taverns and Drinking in Early
America.

Despite the variety, a
generalization holds true. Inns were male domains. The places could be
rough-and-tumble. A Virginia minister in 1751 described patrons as "lazy,"
"dissolute," and "the very Dreggs of the People." Customers drank heavily. Foul
language was commonplace. A diarist said that even in a fine Philadelphia
establishment patronized by leading citizens "some persons there showed a
particular fondness for introducing gross smutty expressions."

Gambling was widespread. Patrons
could participate in raffles, and card and dice games, and bet on cockfights
and horse races. Felons planned crimes, fenced goods, and passed counterfeit
money in inns. Fights and murders were common.

The glee in this club was perhaps improved by beer and
spirits, but music made for entertainment and companionship in taverns.

Sometimes a professional musician performed free-lance. The
talents of these entertainers varied. For example, an advertisement from New
York touts a violinist who could sing and do animal imitations. A diarist in
1744 mentioned hearing another singer whose voice was too big for the small inn
he visited.

If a professional musician was
unavailable, guests might perform for their own amusement. Homemade music was
common in eighteenth-century America, Michael Saffle said. He teaches arts and
humanities at Virginia Tech's Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, has a
doctoral degree from Stanford in music and humanities, and has a long-standing
interest in early American music.

"People sang their own songs,
often played and even made their own very simple instruments. Keyboard
instruments were rare. Violins were more common. People also owned flutes,
occasionally trumpets and other wind instruments," Saffle said.

Some tavern owners kept
instruments for these occasions, Turner said. A colonial inventory of
Williamsburg's Shields Tavern shows instruments on hand. The nearby Raleigh
Tavern had a harpsichord. Any guest who provided his own accompaniment probably
relied on something light and portable, like a flute or a violin, Turner said.
Period instrument makers sold a special traveling violin—a pochette—so small it
could fit in a coat pocket.

Of course, inn patrons always
could fall back on their voices. There was group singing. It was not merely
about making communal music, however, according to historian Peter Thompson in
his book Rum, Punch and Revolution: Taverngoing and Public Life in
Eighteenth Century Philadelphia. Toasting
and singing were means of drawing together people from disparate backgrounds,
Thompson wrote, though the gambit didn't always work.

"Neither practice was entirely
effective, not least because a ïtypical' tavern company often contained men who
did not want to be drawn into enforced intimacy with the dominant crowd," he
wrote. "For this reason, the very forms by which taverngoers attempted to
overcome their differences could also become the occasion of division and
contest."

Lutheran minister Henry Muhlenberg
describes just such a situation during 1752 in a New Jersey tavern. The
minister refused to join in a songfest and dared to criticize certain romantic
songs, which earned him abuse from other patrons.

So, what songs did people sing in taverns? Few references to
specific tunes survive. Odds are good, though, that whatever people sang, their
tunes originated in the British Isles.

"An ocean separated early
English-speaking settlers from the land of their origin, but not from its
language, ideology, popular beliefs, proverbs, verses, or music," wrote
University of Michigan professor Richard Crawford in America's Musical Life:
A History.

For the high and the low, entertainment meant music—here, by
professional musicians at a well-heeled and lightly trod ball.

According to Crawford, two rich
sources of music in British North America during the 1700s were traditional
songs and broadside ballads.

By the eighteenth century,
traditional songs had been passed orally from generation to generation.
Children often learned these songs from parents and grandparents, and, as
adults, taught them to their children. Although the origin and creators were
largely unknown, traditional songs survived for decades and sometimes for
centuries.

Though the oral transmission of
these songs was a powerful force in the 1700s, there also was interest in
preserving them in written form. Individuals collected them and published
anthologies of traditional music. Thomas Jefferson shelved some of these works
in his music library. Music for drinking songs, country dances, and English,
Scottish, and Irish airs rested near works by Vivaldi, Handel, and Haydn.
Jefferson also liked playing fiddle tunes heard at local gatherings, according
to historian Gilbert Chase in America's Music: From the Pilgrims to the
Present.

Particularly popular in Virginia
in the 1750s and later was Scottish music, Turner said. Scottish music was in
vogue in London during the period. Virginians who wanted to keep up with
current English fashion eagerly embraced these tunes. In his later years,
George Washington developed a fondness for these songs and encouraged his
granddaughters to perform them for him. Scottish music also was enjoyed by the
many Scots who settled and worked in Virginia.

Traditional songs touched on all
sorts of topics. To appreciate the variety, consider three ballads Benjamin
Franklin described as widely known in a 1765 letter to his brother: "Chevy
Chase," "The Children in the Woods," and "The Spanish Lady." "Chevy Chase"
tells of a bloody fight between knights. "The Children in the Woods" is a tale
about the death of two young orphans caused by their uncle's greed for their
inheritance. "The Spanish Lady" reveals the sufferings of a Spanish woman
captured by English soldiers. She falls in love with one of her captors, who
already has a wife and abandons his smitten prisoner for her.

Unlike modern popular songs,
eighteenth-century ballads could be long, running to about twenty stanzas,
Turner said. None could be omitted because all were required to tell the story.

Another source of popular songs
was the broadside ballad, according to Crawford. The name derived from the
sheets of paper on which they were printed. Topics ranged from current and
historical events to crime, love, and religion. The growing split between
colonists and Great Britain was a source of broadside songs in the second half
of the eighteenth century, and traditional ballads found their way onto
broadsides. Broadsides often provided the words to a song, possibly an
illustration, and, at times, directions to sing the words to a well-known tune.

In theory, anybody with a yen to
compose songs and the money to pay for the printing could publish a broadside
song. Their presence, however, does not mean that a colonial Tin Pan Alley or
music industry churned out ditties for eager public consumption, Virginia
Tech's Saffle said.

"Even in the United States or
colonial America of the eighteenth century there was no such thing, strictly
speaking, as popular music. That term means several things, but one important
one has to do with a ïpopular' or mass audience," he said. "And there simply
wasn't one in the colonies then."

Dean Shostak plays melodies on the glass armonica with moistened fingers on glass bowls or glasses spun by a wheel.

The booming sale of sheet music
would not begin in earnest until the nineteenth century, and truly mass-market
music would have to wait until the invention of the phonograph and radio.

Besides singing, taverns
occasionally featured dancing. This reflected a widespread love of dance, which
touched every social class in Virginia, Turner said. Because dancing meant
bringing women into a male arena, some owners made accommodations to female
sensibilities. Wetherburn's Tavern in Williamsburg added a room just for
dances, with a lady's entrance that allowed them to avoid the bar.

Although Colonial Williamsburg guests come from one of the most
musically saturated cultures in history, they often are intrigued and
entertained by the music Turner and his colleagues play in the taverns. Turner
has found some songs strike an especially responsive chord. "I Once Loved a
Lass," for example, tells of unrequited love. "Leezie Lindsay" tells of love
triumphant. "Nottingham Ale" is a rousing drinking song. Sing-alongs are
broadly popularly, especially among families with children.

Though Turner enjoys performing
and guests enjoy listening to him, he said that the music of Colonial
Williamsburg's taverns does more than add a little entertainment to a visit. He
said the tunes offer another way to see and to understand the American
colonists.

When he can, Turner uses songs to
illuminate eighteenth-century attitudes and events. For example, asked to play
"Highland Laddie," he also will discuss the English repression of Highland
culture following Scottish rebellion in the 1700s. Although the English banned
bagpipes, native and expatriate Scottish fiddlers mimicked their sound as a
form of protest.

Turner said: "The music can tell
us a lot." It reveals to us, in a way that text or lectures cannot, the joys,
fears, heroes, virtues, vices, politics, and aspirations of the ordinary men
and women who lived two centuries ago.

Ed Crews contributed to the autumn 2003 journal a profile of
General Cornwallis and an article on Colonial Williamsburg's coopers. His story
on Colonial Williamsburg's Geddy Foundry appears elsewhere in this issue.